Abstract

Abstract In this paper I deal with two stories- “The Call of Cthulhu” by H.P Lovecraft and Sarpopuran by Samiran Das from a posthumanist paradigm. Lovecraft has often been considered as to have fathered the Cthulhu cult, that he depicts as something fearful and incomprehensible to the Cartesian hubris. The story mainly revolves around the effigy of Cthulhu that has a strange appearance. The effigy is a queer admixture of a lively presence that has a tentacular head, giant claws and sharpened wings at back. The effigy entails an absolute sense of co-existence of different species. On a different level, Sarpopuran explores the crisis of human-nonhuman existence- where a snake coming out of a human body engulfs the human and takes the shape of it. While the former questions the humanist supremacy based on rationale modernity- a vicious child of Enlightenment Philosophy; the latter brings forward human helplessness in front of the ‘anomalous’ animal. Both the stories also challenge the idea of hierarchical human subjectivity based on the idea of transformation of neural signs into a network of signs, i.e, language- the former through its use of inexplicable words such as ‘nagl fhtagn’ and the latter, by giving language to the snake. The work- that constitutes- this paper, would take a deeper look into these aspects of the texts to find out whether such nuanced narratives can be considered as becoming part of a radical ontology- what I propose to call as posthuman ipseity or the ‘naming’ of an ontology becomes dichotomous and continues to sustain the hierarchy of what it is ‘post-ing’- the human.